PRINTED AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

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Copyright, 1915, by
GENE STRATTON-PORTER

Copyright, 1926, by
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

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GENE STRATTON-PORTER

A LITTLE STORY OF HER LIFE AND WORK

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GENE STRATTON-PORTER

A Little Story of Her Life and Work

FOR several years Doubleday, Page & Company have been receiving
repeated requests for information about the life and books of
Gene Stratton-Porter. Her fascinating nature work with bird,
flower, and moth, and the natural wonders of the Limberlost
Swamp, made famous as the scene of her nature romances, all have
stirred much curiosity among readers everywhere.

Mrs. Porter did not possess what has been called "an aptitude for
personal publicity." Indeed, up to the time of her death, she
discouraged quite successfully any attempt to stress the personal
note. It was practically impossible, however, to do the kind of
work she did – to make genuine contributions to natural
science by her wonderful field work among birds, insects, and
flowers, and then, through her romances, to bring several hundred
thousands of people to love and understand nature in a way they
never did before – without arousing a legitimate interest in her
own history, her ideals, her methods of work, and all that
underlies the structure of her unusual achievement.

The following pages are therefore adapted from what might be
styled the personal record of Gene Stratton-Porter. This will
account for the very intimate picture of family life in the
Middle West for some years following the Civil War.

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Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his
wife, at the time of their marriage, as a "ninety-pound bit of
pink porcelain, pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge,
having a big rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her
life, and bearing the loveliest name ever given a woman – Mary."
He further added that "God fashioned her heart to be gracious,
her body to be the mother of children, and as her especial gift
of Grace, he put Flower Magic into her fingers."

Mary Stratton
was the mother of twelve lusty babies, all of whom she reared
past eight years of age, losing two a little over that, through
an attack of scarlet fever with whooping cough; too ugly a
combination for even such a wonderful mother as she. With this
brood on her hands she found time to keep an immaculate house, to
set a table renowned in her part of the state, to entertain with
unfailing hospitality all who came to her door, to beautify her
home with such means as she could command, to embroider and
fashion clothing by hand for her children; but her great gift
was conceded by all to be the making of things to grow. At that
she was wonderful. She started dainty little vines and climbing
plants from tiny seeds she found in rice and coffee. Rooted
things she soaked in water, rolled in fine sand, planted
according to habit, and they almost never failed to justify her
expectations. She even grew trees and shrubs from slips and
cuttings no one else would have thought of trying to cultivate,
her last resort being to cut a slip diagonally, insert the lower
end in a small potato, and plant as if rooted. And it nearly
always grew!

There is a shaft of white stone standing at her head in a
cemetery that belonged to her on a corner of her husband's land;
but to Mrs. Porter's mind her mother's real monument was a cedar
of Lebanon which she set in the manner described above. The cedar
topped the brow of a little hill crossing the grounds. She carried
two slips from Ohio, where they were given to her by a man who
had brought the trees as tiny things from the Holy Land. She
planted both in this way, one in her dooryard and one in her
cemetery. The tree on the hill stands thirty feet tall now,
topping all others, and has a trunk two feet in circumference.

Mrs. Porter's mother was of Dutch extraction, and like all Dutch
women she worked her special magic with bulbs, which she favoured
above other flowers. Tulips, daffodils, star flowers, lilies,
dahlias, little bright hyacinths, that she called "blue bells,"
she dearly loved. From these she distilled exquisite perfume by
putting clusters, at the time of perfect bloom, in bowls lined with
freshly made, unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting
the few drops of extract thus obtained with alcohol. "She could
do more different things," said her daughter, "and finish them all
in a greater degree of perfection than any other woman I have
ever known. If I were limited to one adjective in describing her,
'capable' would be the word."

The author's father was descended from a long line of ancestors
of British blood. He was named for, and traced his origin to,
that first Mark Stratton who lived in New York, married the
famous beauty, Anne Hutchinson, and settled on Stratton Island,
afterward corrupted to Staten, according to family tradition.
From that point back for generations across the sea he followed
his line to the family of Strattons of which the Earl of
Northbrook is the present head. To his British traditions and
the customs of his family, Mark Stratton clung with rigid
tenacity, never swerving from his course a particle under the
influence of environment or association. All his ideas were
clear-cut; no man could influence him against his better
judgment. He believed in God, in courtesy, in honour, and
cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he
would rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he
could be proud, than on the throne of England, which was the
strongest way he knew to express himself. His very first earnings
he spent for a book; when other men rested, he read; all his life
he was a student of extraordinarily tenacious memory. He
especially loved history: Rollands, Wilson's Outlines, Hume,
Macauley, Gibbon, Prescott, and Bancroft, he could quote from all
of them paragraphs at a time, contrasting the views of different
writers on a given event, and remembering dates with unfailing
accuracy. "He could repeat the entire Bible," says Mrs.
Stratton-Porter, "giving chapters and verses, save the books of
Generations; these he said 'were a waste of gray matter to
learn.' I never knew him to fail in telling where any verse
quoted to him was to be found in the Bible." And she added: "I was
almost afraid to make these statements, although there are many
living who can corroborate them, until John Muir published the
story of his boyhood days, and in it I found the history of such
rearing as was my father's, told of as the customary thing among
the children of Muir's time; and I have referred many inquirers
as to whether this feat were possible, to the Muir book."

All his life, with no thought of fatigue or of inconvenience to
himself, Mark Stratton travelled miles uncounted to share what he
had learned with those less fortunately situated, by delivering
sermons, lectures, talks on civic improvement and politics. To
him the love of God could be shown so genuinely in no other way
as in the love of his fellowmen. He worshipped beauty: beautiful
faces, souls, hearts, beautiful landscapes, trees, animals,
flowers. He loved colour: rich, bright colour, and every
variation down to the faintest shadings. He was especially fond
of red, and his daughter carefully kept a cardinal silk
handkerchief that he was carrying when stricken with apoplexy at
the age of seventy-eight. "It was so like him," she commented, "to
have that scrap of vivid colour in his pocket. He never was too
busy to fertilize a flower bed or to dig holes for the setting of
a tree or bush. A word constantly on his lips was 'tidy.' It
applied equally to a woman, a house, a field, or a barn lot. He
had a streak of genius in his make-up: the genius of large
appreciation. Over inspired Biblical passages, over great books,
over sunlit landscapes, over a white violet abloom in deep shade,
over a heroic deed of man, I have seen his brow light up, his
eyes shine."

Mrs. Porter's father was constantly reading aloud
to his children and to visitors descriptions of the great deeds
of men. Two "hair-raisers" she especially remembered with
increased heart-beats were the story of John Maynard,
who piloted a burning boat to safety while he slowly roasted at
the wheel. One of her most vivid memories was
the inflection of her father's voice as he would cry in imitation
of the captain: "John Maynard!" and then give the reply until it sank to a mere gasp: "Aye,
aye, sir!" His other favourite was
the story of Clemanthe, and her lover's immortal answer to her
question: "Shall we meet again?"

To this mother at forty-six, and this father at fifty, each at
intellectual top-notch, every faculty having been stirred for
years by the dire stress of the Civil War, and the period immediately
following, the author was born. From childhood she "thought things which she felt should be saved," and frequently
tugging at her mother's skirts begged her to "set down" what
the child considered stories and poems. Most of these were some
big fact in nature that thrilled her, usually expressed in
Biblical terms; for the Bible was read twice a day before the
family and helpers, and an average of three services were
attended on Sunday.

Mrs. Porter's first all-alone effort was printed in
wabbly letters on the fly-leaf of an old grammar. It was
entitled: "Ode to the Moon." "Not that I had an
idea what an 'ode' was, other than that I had heard it discussed
in the family together with different forms of poetic expression.
The spelling must have been by proxy: but I did know the words I
used, what they meant, and the idea I was trying to convey.

"No other farm was ever quite so lovely as the one on which I was
born after this father and mother had spent twenty-five years
beautifying it," she said. It was called "Hopewell" after
the home of some of her father's British ancestors. The natural
location was perfect, the land rolling and hilly, with several
flowing springs and little streams crossing it in three
directions, while plenty of forest still remained. The days of
pioneer struggles were past. The roads were smooth and level as
floors, the house and barn commodious; the family rode abroad in
a double carriage trimmed in patent leather, drawn by a matched
team of gray horses, and sometimes the father "speeded a little"
for the delight of the children. "We had comfortable clothing, and were getting our joy from life without
that pinch of anxiety which must have existed in the beginning,
although I know that Father and Mother always held steady, and
took a large measure of joy from life in passing."

Her mother's health, which always had been perfect, broke about
the time of the author's first remembrance due to typhoid fever
contracted after nursing three of her children through it. She
lived for several years, but with continual suffering, amounting
at time to positive torture.

So it happened, that, led by impulse and aided by an escape from
the training given her sisters, instead of "sitting on a cushion
and sewing a fine seam" – the threads of the fabric had to be
counted; and just so many allowed to each stitch! – this youngest
child of a numerous household spent her waking hours with the
wild. She followed her father and the boys afield, and when tired
out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking with shy
creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she pleased,
amusing herself with the birds, flowers, insects, and plays she
invented. "By the day," writes the author, "I trotted from one
object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of
made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching
fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird
with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the
inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an
ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets."

She had a corner of the garden under a big Bartlett pear tree for
her very own, and each spring she began by planting radishes and
lettuce when the gardening was done; and before these had time to
sprout she set the same beds full of spring flowers, and so
followed out the season. She made special pets of the birds,
locating nest after nest, and immediately projecting herself into
the daily life of the occupants. "No one," she said, "ever taught
me more than that the birds were useful, a gift of God for our
protection from insect pests on fruit and crops; and a gift of
Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected.
From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely
careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over my mouth
when he lifted me for a peep into the nest of the humming-bird,
and did he not walk softly and whisper when he approached the
spot? So I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I
knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping
bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened
at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the
feet of the mother bird."

In the nature of this child of the out-of-doors there ran a fibre
of care for wild things. It was instinct with her to go slowly,
to touch lightly, to deal lovingly with every living thing:
flower, moth, bird, or animal. She never gathered great handfuls
of frail wild flowers, carried them an hour and threw them away.
If she picked any, she took only a few, mostly to lay on her
mother's pillow – for she had a habit of drawing comfort from a
cinnamon pink or a trillium laid where its delicate fragrance
reached her with every breath. "I am quite sure," Mrs. Porter
wrote, "that I never in my life, in picking flowers, dragged up
the plant by the roots, as I frequently saw other people do. I
was taught from infancy to cut a bloom I wanted. My regular habit
was to lift one plant of each kind, especially if it were a
species new to me, and set it in my wild-flower garden."

To the birds and flowers the child added moths and butterflies,
because she saw them so frequently, the brilliance of colour in
yard and garden attracting more than could be found elsewhere. So
she grew with the wild, loving, studying, giving all her time. "I
fed butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen
of a cellar window, doctored all the
sick and wounded birds and animals the men brought me from afield;
made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits they carried in for
my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I grew older,
gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in Fort Wayne. So
I had the first money I ever earned."

Her father and mother had strong artistic tendencies, although
they would have scoffed at the idea themselves, yet the manner in
which they laid off their fields, the home they built, the
growing things they preserved, the way they planted, the life
they led, all go to prove exactly that thing. Their bush- and
vine-covered fences crept around the acres they owned in a strip
of gaudy colour; their orchard lay in a valley, a square of apple
trees in the centre widely bordered by peach, so that it appeared
at bloom time like a great pink-bordered white blanket on the
face of earth. Swale they might have drained, and would not, made
sheets of blue flag, marigold and buttercups. From the home you
could not look in any direction without seeing a picture of
beauty.

Later Mrs. Porter went back to buy that land and restore it to the
exact condition in which she knew it as a
child. She found that the house had been
burned, killing all the big trees set by her mother's hand
immediately surrounding it. The hills were shorn and ploughed
down, filling and obliterating the creeks and springs. Most of
the forest had been cut, and stood in corn. The old catalpa in the
fence corner beside the road and the Bartlett pear under which she
had planted her wild-flower garden were all that was left of the dooryard,
while a few gnarled apple trees remained of the orchard, which
had been reset in another place. The garden had been moved, also
the lanes; the one creek remaining out of three crossed the
meadow at the foot of the orchard. It flowed a sickly current
over a dredged bed between bare, straight banks. The whole place
seemed worse than a dilapidated graveyard to her. All her love and
ten times the money she had at command never could have put back
the face of nature as she knew it on that land.

As a child Mrs. Porter had very few books, only three of her own
outside of school books.
She had a
treasure house in the school books of her elders, especially the
McGuffey series of Readers from One to Six. For pictures she was
driven to the Bible, dictionary, historical works read by her
father, agricultural papers, and medical books about cattle and
sheep.

"Near the time of my mother's passing we moved from Hopewell to
the city of Wabash in order that she might have constant medical
attention," Mrs. Porter wrote, "and the younger children better opportunities for
schooling. Here we had magazines and more books in which I was
interested. The one volume in which my heart was enwrapt was a
collection of masterpieces of fiction belonging to my eldest
sister. It contained 'Paul and Virginia,' 'Undine,' 'Picciola,'
'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and several
others I soon learned by heart, and the reading and rereading of
those exquisitely expressed and conceived stories may have done
much in forming high conceptions of what really constitutes
literature and in furthering the lofty ideals instilled by my
parents. One of these stories formed the basis of my first
publicly recognized literary effort."

Reared by people who constantly pointed out every natural beauty,
using it wherever possible to drive home a precept, the child
lived out-of-doors with the wild almost entirely. If she reported
promptly three times a day when the bell rang at meal time, with
enough clothing to constitute a decent covering, nothing more was
asked until the Sabbath. To be taken from such freedom, her feet
shod, her body restricted by as much clothing as ever had been
worn on Sunday, shut up in a schoolroom, and set to droning over
books, most of which she detested, was the worst punishment ever
inflicted upon her. She hated mathematics in any
form and spent all her time on natural science, language, and
literature. "Friday afternoon was always
taken up with an exercise called 'rhetoricals,' a misnomer as a
rule. Each week pupils of one of the four
years furnished entertainment for the assembled high school and
faculty. Our subjects were always assigned, and the children cordially
disliked them. One particular day young Gene was to have a paper on
'Mathematical Law.'

"I put off the work until my paper had been called for several
times, and so came to Thursday night with excuses and not a line,"
she remembered.
"I was told to bring my work the next morning without fail. I went
home in hot anger. Why in all this beautiful world, would they
not allow me to do something I could do, and let any one of four
members of my class who revelled in mathematics do my subject?
That evening I was distracted. 'I can't do a paper on
mathematics, and I won't!' I said stoutly; 'but I'll do such a
paper on a subject I can write about as will open their foolish
eyes and make them see how wrong they are.'

"Before me on the table lay the book I loved, the most wonderful
story in which was 'Picciola' by Saintine. Instantly I began to
write. Breathlessly I wrote for hours. I exceeded our limit ten
times over. The poor Italian Count, the victim of political
offences, shut by Napoleon from the wonderful grounds, mansion,
and life that were his, restricted to the bare prison walls of
Fenestrella, deprived of books and writing material, his one
interest in life became a sprout of green, sprung, no doubt, from
a seed dropped by a passing bird, between the stone flagging of
the prison yard before his window. With him I had watched over it
through all the years since I first had access to the book; with
him I had prayed for it. I had broken into a cold sweat of fear
when the jailer first menaced it; I had hated the wind that bent
it roughly, and implored the sun. I had sung a pæan of joy at
its budding, and worshipped in awe before its thirty perfect
blossoms. The Count had named it 'Picciola' – the little one – to
me also it was a personal possession. That night we lived the
life of our 'little one' over again, the Count and I, and never
were our anxieties and our joys more poignant.

"Next morning, I dared my crowd to see how
long they could remain on the grounds, and yet reach the assembly
room before the last toll of the bell. This scheme worked.
Coming in so late the principal opened exercises without
remembering my paper. Again, at noon, I was as late as I dared
be, and I escaped until near the close of the exercises, through
which I sat in cold fear. When my name was reached at last the
principal looked at me inquiringly and then announced my
inspiring mathematical subject. I arose, walked to the front, and
made my best bow. Then I said: 'I waited until yesterday because
I knew absolutely nothing about my subject' – the audience
laughed – 'and I could find nothing either here or in the library
at home, so last night I reviewed Saintine's masterpiece,
"Picciola."'

"Then instantly I began to read. I was almost paralyzed at my
audacity, and with each word I expected to hear a terse little
interruption. Imagine my amazement when I heard at the end of the
first page: 'Wait a minute!' Of course I waited, and the
principal left the room. A moment later she reappeared
accompanied by the superintendent of the city schools. 'Begin
again,' she said. 'Take your time.'

"I was too amazed to speak. Then thought came in a rush. My paper
was good. It was as good as I had believed it. It was better than
I had known. I did go on! We took that assembly room and the
corps of teachers into our confidence, the Count and I, and told
them all that was in our hearts about a little flower that sprang
between the paving stones of a prison yard. The Count and I were
free spirits. From the book I had learned that. He got into
political trouble through it, and I had got into mathematical
trouble, and we told our troubles. One instant the room was in
laughter, the next the boys bowed their heads, and the girls who
had forgotten their handkerchiefs cried in their aprons. For
almost sixteen big foolscap pages I held them, and I was eager to
go on and tell them more about it when I reached the last line.
Never again was a subject forced upon me."

After this incident of her schooldays, what had been inclination
before was aroused to determination and the child neglected her
lessons to write. A volume of crude verse fashioned after the
metre of Meredith's "Lucile," a romantic book in rhyme, and two
novels were the fruits of this youthful ardour. Through the
sickness and death of a sister, the author missed the last three
months of school, but, she remarked, "unlike my schoolmates, I
studied harder after leaving school than ever before and in a
manner that did me real good. The most that can be said of what
education I have is that it is the very best kind in the world
for me; the only possible kind that would not ruin a person of my
inclinations. The others of my family had been to college; I
always have been too thankful for words that circumstances
intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove
in company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and
mentality. What small measure of success I have had has come
through preserving my individual point of view, method of
expression, and following in after life the Spartan regulations
of my girlhood home. Whatever I have been able to do, has been
done through the line of education my father saw fit to give me,
and through his and my mother's methods of rearing me.

"My mother went out too soon to know, and my father never saw one
of the books; but he knew I was boiling and bubbling like a yeast
jar in July over some literary work, and if I timidly slipped to
him with a composition, or a faulty poem, he saw good in it, and
made suggestions for its betterment. When I wanted to express
something in colour, he went to an artist, sketched a design for
an easel, personally superintended the carpenter who built it,
and provided tuition. On that same easel I painted the water
colours for 'Moths of the Limberlost,' and one of the most
poignant regrets of my life is that he was not there to see them,
and to know that the easel which he built through his faith in me
was finally used in illustrating a book.

"If I thought it was music through which I could express myself,
he paid for lessons and detected hidden ability that should be
developed. Through the days of struggle he stood fast; firm in
his belief in me. He was half the battle. It was he who demanded
a physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigours
of scientific field- and darkroom work, and the building of ten
books in ten years, five of which were on nature subjects, having
my own illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with
natural history, true to nature. It was he who demanded of me
from birth the finishing of any task I attempted and who taught
me to cultivate patience to watch and wait, even years, if
necessary, to find and secure material I wanted. It was he who
daily lived before me the life of exactly such a man as I
portrayed in 'The Harvester,' and who constantly used every atom
of brain and body power to help and to encourage all men to do
the same."

Marriage, a home of her own, and a daughter for a time filled the
author's hands, but never her whole heart and brain. The book
fever lay dormant a while, and then it became again a compelling
influence. It dominated the life she lived, the cabin she
designed for their home, and the books she read. When her
daughter was old enough to go to school, Mrs. Porter's time came.
She spoke of this period with pride: "I could not afford a maid,
but I was very strong, vital to the marrow, and I knew how to
manage life to make it meet my needs, thanks to even the small
amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin of fourteen rooms,
and kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter's clothes, I
kept a conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six
hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and
linnets, and cooked and washed dishes besides three times a day.
In my spare time (mark the word, there was time to spare else the
books never would have been written and the pictures made) I
mastered photography to such a degree that the manufacturers of
one of our finest brands of print paper once sent the manager of
their factory to me to learn how I handled it. He frankly said
that they could obtain no such results with it as I did. He
wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia, and have me
tell him exactly how I worked. As I was using the family bathroom
for a darkroom and washing negatives and prints on turkey
platters in the kitchen, I was rather put to it when it came to
giving an exhibition. It was scarcely my fault if men could not
handle the paper they manufactured so that it produced the
results that I obtained, so I said I thought the difference might
lie in the chemical properties of the water, and sent this man on
his way satisfied. Possibly it did. But I have a shrewd suspicion
it lay in high-grade plates, a careful exposure, judicious
development, with self-compounded chemicals straight from the
factory, and C.P. I think plates swabbed with wet cotton before
development, intensified if of short exposure, and thoroughly
swabbed again before drying, had much to do with it; and paper
handled in the same painstaking manner had more."

Thus had Mrs. Porter made time to study and to write, and editors
began to accept what she sent them with little if any changes.
She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to
Recreation, and with the first installment was asked to take
charge of the department and furnish material each month for
which she was to be paid at current prices in high-grade
photographic material. We can form some idea of the work she did
under this arrangement from the fact that she had over one
thousand dollars' worth of equipment at the end of the first
year. The second year she increased this by five hundred, and
then accepted a place on the natural history staff of Outing,
working closely with Mr. Caspar Whitney. After a year of this
helpful experience Mrs. Porter began to turn her attention to
what she called "nature studies sugar coated with fiction." Mixing
some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-up fiction, she
wrote a little story entitled "Laddie, the Princess, and the
Pie."

"I was abnormally sensitive," says the author, "about trying to
accomplish any given thing and failing. I had been taught in my
home that it was black disgrace to undertake anything and fail.
My husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines,
and it was not possible to conduct departments in any of them and
not have it known; but only a few people in our locality read
these publications, none of them were interested in nature
photography, or natural science, so what I was trying to do was
not realized even by my own family.

"With them I was much more timid than with the neighbours. Least
of all did I want to fail before my man person and my daughter
and our respective families; so I worked in secret, sent in my
material, and kept as quiet about it as possible. On Outing I had
graduated from the camera department to an illustrated article
each month, and as this kept up the year round, and few
illustrations could be made in winter, it meant that I must
secure enough photographs of wild life in summer to last during
the part of the year when few were to be had.

"Every fair day I spent afield, and my little black horse and
load of cameras, ropes, and ladders became a familiar sight to
the country folk of the Limberlost, in Rainbow Bottom, the
Canoper, on the banks of the Wabash, in woods and thickets and
beside the roads; but few people understood what I was trying to
do, none of them what it would mean were I to succeed. Being so
afraid of failure and the inevitable ridicule in a community
where I was already severly criticised on account of my ideas of
housekeeping, dress, and social customs, I purposely kept
everything I did as quiet as possible. It had to be known that I
was interested in everything afield, and making pictures; also
that I was writing field sketches for nature publications, but
little was thought of it, save as one more 'peculiarity' in me.
So when my little story was finished I went to our store and
looked over the magazines. I chose one to which we did not
subscribe, having an attractive cover, good type, and paper, and
on the back of an old envelope, behind the counter, I scribbled:
Perriton Maxwell, 116 Nassau Street, New York, and sent my story
on its way.

"Then I took a bold step, the first in my self-emancipation.
Money was beginning to come in, and I had some in my purse of my
very own that I had earned when no one even knew I was working. I
argued that if I kept my family so comfortable that they missed
nothing from their usual routine, it was my right to do what I
could toward furthering my personal ambitions in what time I
could save from my housework. And until I could earn enough to
hire capable people to take my place, I held rigidly to that
rule. I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from
ladders high in air, and crossed water on improvised rafts
without a tremor, slipped with many misgivings into the
postoffice and rented a box for myself, so that if I met with
failure my husband and the men in the bank need not know what I
had attempted. That was early May; all summer I waited. I had
heard that it required a long time for an editor to read and to
pass on matter sent him; but my waiting did seem out of all
reason. I was too busy keeping my cabin and doing field work to
repine; but I decided in my own mind that Mr. Maxwell was a 'mean
old thing' to throw away my story and keep the return postage.
Besides, I was deeply chagrined, for I had thought quite well of
my effort myself, and this seemed to prove that I did not know
even the first principles of what would be considered an
interesting story.

"Then one day in September I went into our store on an errand and
the manager said to me: 'I read your story in the Metropolitan
last night. It was great! Did you ever write any fiction before?'

"My head whirled, but I had learned to keep my own counsels, so I
said as lightly as I could, while my heart beat until I feared he
could hear it: 'No. Just a simple little thing! Have you any
spare copies? My sister might want one.'

"He supplied me, so I hurried home, and shutting myself in the
library, I sat down to look my first attempt at fiction in the
face. I quite agreed with the manager that it was 'great.' Then I
wrote Mr. Maxwell a note telling him that I had seen my story in
his magazine, and saying that I was glad he liked it enough to
use it. I had not known a letter could reach New York and bring a
reply so quickly as his answer came. It was a letter that warmed
the deep of my heart. Mr. Maxwell wrote that he liked my story
very much, but the office boy had lost or destroyed my address
with the wrappings, so after waiting a reasonable length of time
to hear from me, he had illustrated it the best he could, and
printed it! He wrote that so many people had spoken to him of a
new, fresh note in it, that he wished me to consider doing him
another in a similar vein for a Christmas leader and he enclosed
my very first check for fiction.

"So I wrote: 'How Laddie and the Princess Spelled Down at the
Christmas Bee.' Mr. Maxwell was pleased to accept that also, with
what I considered high praise, and to ask me to furnish the
illustrations. He specified that he wanted a frontispiece, head
and tail pieces, and six or seven other illustrations. Counting
out the time for his letter to reach me, and the material to
return, I was left with just one day in which to secure the
pictures. They had to be of people costumed in the time of the
early 'seventies and I was short of print paper and chemicals.
First, I telephoned to Fort Wayne for the material I wanted to be
sent without fail on the afternoon train. Then I drove to the
homes of the people I wished to use for subjects and made
appointments for sittings, and ransacked the cabin for costumes.
The letter came on the eight A.M. train. At ten o'clock I was
photographing Colonel Lupton beside my dining-room fireplace for
the father in the story. At eleven I was dressing and posing Miss
Lizzie Huart for the Princess. At twelve I was picturing in one
of my bedrooms a child who served finely for Little Sister, and
an hour later the same child in a cemetery three miles in the
country where I used mounted butterflies from my cases, and
potted plants carried from my conservatory, for a graveyard
scene. The time was early November, but God granted sunshine that
day, and short focus blurred the background. At four o'clock I
was at the schoolhouse, and in the best-lighted room with five or
six models, I was working on the spelling bee scenes. By six I
was in the darkroom developing and drying these plates, every one
of which was good enough to use. I did my best work with
printing-out paper, but I was compelled to use a developing
paper in this extremity, because it could be worked with much
more speed, dried a little between blotters, and mounted. At
three o'clock in the morning I was typing the quotations for the
pictures, at four the parcel stood in the hall for the six
o'clock train, and I realized that I wanted a drink, food, and
sleep, for I had not stopped a second for anything from the time
of reading Mr. Maxwell's letter until his order was ready to
mail. For the following ten years I was equally prompt in doing
all work I undertook, whether pictures or manuscript, without a
thought of consideration for self; and I disappointed the
confident expectations of my nearest and dearest by remaining
sane, normal, and almost without exception the healthiest woman
they knew."

This story and its pictures were much praised, and in the
following year the author was asked for several stories, and even
used bird pictures and natural history sketches, quite an
innovation for a magazine at that time. With this encouragement
she wrote and illustrated a short story of about ten thousand
words, and sent it to the Century. Richard Watson Gilder advised
Mrs. Porter to enlarge it to book size, which she did. This book
is "The Cardinal." Following Mr. Gilder's advice, she recast the
tale and, starting with the mangled body of a cardinal some
marksman had left in the road she was travelling, in a fervour of
love for the birds and indignation at the hunter, she told the
Cardinal's life history in these pages.

The story was promptly accepted and the book was published with
very beautiful half-tones, and cardinal buckram cover.
Incidentally, neither the author's husband nor daughter had the
slightest idea she was attempting to write a book until work had
progressed to that stage where she could not make a legal
contract without her husband's signature. During the quarter century of
its life this book has gone through eight different editions,
varying in form and make-up from the birds in exquisite colour,
as colour work advanced and became feasible, to a binding of
beautiful red morocco. One was tried in gray binding, the colour of the
female cardinal, with the red male used as an insert. Another was
woods green with the red male, and another red with a wild rose
design stamped in. All of these had the author's own illustrations
which authorities agree are the most complete studies of the home
life and relations of a pair of birds ever published.

The story of these illustrations in "The Cardinal" and how the
author got them will be a revelation to most readers. Mrs. Porter
set out to make this the most complete set of bird illustrations
ever secured, in an effort to awaken people to the wonder and
beauty and value of the birds. She had worked around half a dozen
nests for two years and had carried a lemon tree from her
conservatory to the location of one nest, buried the tub, and
introduced the branches among those the birds used in
approaching their home that she might secure proper illustrations
for the opening chapter, which was placed in the South. When the
complete bird series was finished, the difficult work over, and
there remained only a few characteristic Wabash River studies of
flowers, vines, and bushes for chapter tail pieces to be secured,
the author "met her Jonah," and her escape was little short of a
miracle.

After a particularly strenuous spring afield, one teeming day in
early August she spent the morning in the river bottom beside the
Wabash. A heavy rain followed by August sun soon had her dripping
while she made several studies of wild morning glories, but she
was particularly careful to wrap up and drive slowly going home,
so that she would not chill. In the afternoon the author went to
the river northeast of town to secure mallow pictures for another
chapter, and after working in burning sun on the river bank until
exhausted, she several times waded the river to examine bushes on
the opposite bank. On the way home she had a severe chill, and
for the following three weeks lay twisted in the convulsions of
congestion, insensible most of the time. Skilled doctors and
nurses did their best, which they admitted would have availed
nothing if the patient had not had a constitution without a flaw
upon which to work.

"This is the history," said Mrs. Porter, "of one little tail
piece among the pictures. There were about thirty others, none so
strenuous, but none easy, each having a living, fighting history
for me. If I were to give in detail the story of the two years'
work required to secure the set of bird studies illustrating 'The
Cardinal,' it would make a much larger book than the life of the
bird."

"The Cardinal" was published in June of 1903. On the 20th of
October, 1904, "Freckles" appeared. Mrs. Porter had been delving
afield with all her heart
and strength for several years, and in
the course of her work had spent every other day for three months
in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of studies of the nest
of a black vulture. Early in her married life she had met a
Scottish lumberman, who told her of the swamp and of securing fine
timber there for Canadian shipbuilders, and later when she had
moved to within less than a mile of its northern boundary, she
met a man who was buying curly maple, black walnut, golden oak,
wild cherry, and other wood extremely valuable for a big
furniture factory in Grand Rapids. There was one particular
woman, of all those the author worked among, who exercised
herself most concerning her. She never failed to come out if she
saw her driving down the lane to the woods, and caution her to be
careful. If she felt that Mrs. Porter had become interested and
forgotten that it was long past meal time, she would send out
food and water or buttermilk to refresh her. She had her family
posted, and if any of them saw a bird with a straw or a hair in
its beak, they followed until they found its location. It was her
husband who drove the stake and ploughed around the killdeer nest
in the cornfield to save it for the author; and he did many other
acts of kindness without understanding exactly what he was doing
or why. "Merely that I wanted certain things was enough for those
people," writes Mrs. Porter. "Without question they helped me in
every way their big hearts could suggest to them, because they
loved to be kind, and to be generous was natural with them. The
woman was busy keeping house and mothering a big brood, and
every living creature that came her way, besides. She took me in,"
said Mrs. Porter, "and I put her soul, body, red head, and all, into Sarah Duncan.
The lumber and furniture man I combined in McLean. Freckles was a
composite of certain ideals and my own field experiences, merged
with those of Mr. Bob Burdette Black, who, at the expense of much
time and careful work, had done more for me than any other ten
men afield. The Angel was an idealized picture of my daughter.

"I dedicated the book to my husband, Mr. Charles Darwin Porter,
for several reasons, the chiefest being that he deserved it. When
word was brought me by lumbermen of the nest of the Black Vulture
in the Limberlost, I hastened to tell my husband the wonderful
story of the big black bird, the downy white baby, the pale blue
egg, and to beg back a rashly made promise not to work in the
Limberlost. Being a natural history enthusiast himself, he agreed
that I must go; but he qualified the assent with the proviso that
no one less careful of me than he, might accompany me there. His
business had forced him to allow me to work alone, with hired
guides or the help of oilmen and farmers elsewhere; but a
Limberlost trip at that time was not to be joked about. It had
not been shorn, branded, and tamed. There were most excellent
reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was impenetrable.
Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just invading
it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and
quagmire filled with every plant, animal, and human danger known
in the worst of such locations in the Central States.

"A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired
to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before
we reached the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to
pieces and the horse stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr.
Porter in kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The time was late
June; we forced our way between steaming, fetid pools, through
swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, poisonous insects, keeping a
sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle deep at every step,
and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our progress was a
steady succession of prying and pulling each other to the
surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts of
our bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the
tree, cleared the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed
its unspeakable odours for nearly forty feet to its farthest
recess, and brought the baby and egg to the light in his
leaf-lined hat.

"We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in
deodorant and binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every
third day for almost three months we made this trip, until Little
Chicken was able to take wing. Of course we soon made a road to
the tree, grew accustomed to the disagreeable features of the
swamp and contemptuously familiar with its dangers, so that I
worked anywhere in it I chose with other assistance; but no trip
was so hard and disagreeable as the first. Mr. Porter insisted
upon finishing the Little Chicken series, so that 'deserve' is a
poor word for any honour that might accrue to him for his part in
the book."

This was the nucleus of the book, but the story itself originated
from the fact that one day, while leaving the swamp, a big
feather with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and
swirling earthward and fell in the author's path. Instantly she
looked upward to locate the bird, which from the size and
formation of the quill could have been nothing but an eagle; her
eyes, well trained and fairly keen though they were, could not
see the bird, which must have been soaring above range. Familiar
with the life of the vulture family, the author changed the bird
from which the feather fell to that described in "Freckles." Mrs.
Porter had the old swamp at that time practically untouched, and
all its traditions to work upon and stores of natural history
material. This falling feather began the book which in a few days
she had definitely planned and in six months completely written.
Her title for it was "The Falling Feather," that tangible thing
which came drifting down from Nowhere, just as the boy came, and
she always regretted the change to "Freckles."

"When 'Freckles' was finished," said Mrs. Porter, "I sent the manuscript to
Doubleday, Page & Company, who accepted it. They liked it well
enough to take a special interest in it and to bring it out with
greater expense than it was at all customary to put upon a novel
at that time; and this in face of the fact that they had
repeatedly warned me that the nature work in it would kill fully
half its chances with the public. Mr. F.N. Doubleday, starting on
a trip to the Bahamas, remarked that he would like to take a
manuscript with him to read, and the office force decided to put
'Freckles' into his grip. The story of the plucky young chap won
his way to the heart of the publisher, under a silk cotton tree,
'neath bright southern skies, and made such a friend of him that
through the years of its book-life it has been the object of
special attention."

That more than 50,000,000 readers have found pleasure and profit
in Mrs. Porter's books is a cause for particular gratification.
These stories all have, as a fundamental reason of their
existence, the author's great love of nature. To have imparted
this love to others – to have inspired many hundreds of thousands
to look for the first time with seeing eyes at the pageant of the
out-of-doors – is a satisfaction that must endure. For the part of
the publishers, they began their business by issuing "Nature
Books" at a time when the sale of such works was problematical.
As their tastes and inclinations were along the same lines which
Mrs. Porter loved to follow, it gave them great pleasure to be
associated with her books which opened the eyes of so great a
public to new and worthy fields of enjoyment.

The history of "Freckles" is unique. The publishers had inserted
marginal drawings on many pages, but these, instead of attracting
attention to the nature charm of the book, seemed to have exactly
a contrary effect. The public wanted a novel. The illustrations
made it appear to be a nature book, and it required three long
slow years for "Freckles" to pass from hand to hand and prove
that there really was a novel between the covers, but that it was
a story that took its own time and wound slowly toward its end,
stopping its leisurely course for bird, flower, lichen face, blue
sky, perfumed wind, and the closest intimacies of the daily life
of common folk. Ten years have wrought a great change in the
sentiment against nature work and the interest in it. Thousands
who then looked upon the world with unobserving eyes are now
straining every nerve to accumulate enough to be able to end life
where they may have bird, flower, and tree for daily companions.

Mrs. Porter's account of the advice she received at this time is
particularly interesting. Three editors who read "Freckles"
before it was published offered to produce it, but all of them
expressed precisely the same opinion: "The book will never sell
well as it is. If you want to live from the proceeds of your
work, if you want to sell even moderately, you must cut out the
nature stuff." "Now to put in the nature stuff," continues the
author, "was the express purpose for which the book had been
written. I had had one year's experience with 'The Song of the
Cardinal,' frankly a nature book, and from the start I realized
that I never could reach the audience I wanted with a book on
nature alone. To spend time writing a book based wholly upon
human passion and its outworking I would not. So I compromised on
a book into which I put all the nature work that came naturally
within its scope, and seasoned it with little bits of imagination
and straight copy from the lives of men and women I had known
intimately, folk who lived in a simple, common way with which I
was familiar. So I said to my publishers: 'I will write the books
exactly as they take shape in my mind. You publish them. I know
they will sell enough that you will not lose. If I do not make
over six hundred dollars on a book I shall never utter a
complaint. Make up my work as I think it should be and leave it
to the people as to what kind of book they will take into their
hearts and homes.' I altered 'Freckles' slightly, but from that
time on we worked on this agreement.

"My years of nature work have not been without considerable
insight into human nature, as well," continued Mrs. Porter. "I
know its failings, its inborn tendencies, its weaknesses, its
failures, its depth of crime; and the people who feel called upon
to spend their time analyzing, digging into, and uncovering these
sources of depravity have that privilege, more's the pity.
I have lived mostly in the country and worked in
the woods. For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have
met, lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an
overwhelming number of thoroughly clean and decent people who
still believe in God and cherish high ideals, and it is upon the
lives of these that I base what I write. To contend that this
does not produce a picture true to life is idiocy. It does. It
produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best that good men
and good women can do at level best.

"I care very little for the magazine or newspaper critics who
proclaim that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my
pictures of life are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I
glory in them! They are straight, living pictures from the lives
of men and women of morals, honour, and loving kindness. They
form 'idealized pictures of life' because they are copies from
life where it touches religion, chastity, love, home, and hope of
Heaven ultimately. None of these roads leads to publicity and the
divorce court. They all end in the shelter and seclusion of a
home.

"Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to
teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is
true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, that the
idea has infected even the women."

In 1906, having seen a few of Mrs. Porter's studies of bird life,
Mr. Edward Bok telegraphed the author asking her to meet him in
Chicago. She had a big portfolio of fine prints from plates for
which she had gone to the last extremity of painstaking care, and
the result was an order from Mr. Bok for a six months' series in
the Ladies' Home Journal of the author's best bird studies
accompanied by descriptions of how she secured them. This
material was later put in book form under the title, "What I Have
Done with Birds," and is regarded as authoritative on the subject
of bird photography and bird life, for in truth it covers every
phase of the life of the birds described, and contains much of
other nature subjects.

By this time Mrs. Porter had made a contract with her publishers
to alternate her books. She agreed to do a nature book for love,
and then, by way of compromise, a piece of nature work spiced
with enough fiction to tempt her class of readers. In this way
she hoped that they would absorb enough of the nature work while
reading the fiction to send them afield, and at the same time
keep in their minds her picture of what she considers the only
life worth living. She was still assured that only a straight
novel would "pay," but she was living, meeting all her expenses,
giving her family many luxuries, and saving a little sum for a
rainy day she foresaw on her horoscope. To be comfortably
clothed and fed, to have time and tools for her work, is all she
ever asked of life.

In August of 1909 two books on which the author had been working
for years culminated at the same time: a nature novel, and a
straight nature book. The novel was, in a way, a continuation of
"Freckles," filled as usual with wood lore, but more concerned
with moths than birds. Mrs. Porter had been finding and picturing
exquisite big night flyers during several years of field work
among the birds, and from what she could have readily done with
them she saw how it would be possible for a girl rightly
constituted and environed to make a living, and a good one, at
such work. So was conceived "A Girl of the Limberlost." "This
comes fairly close to my idea of a good book," she writes. "No
possible harm can be done any one in reading it. The book can,
and does, present a hundred pictures that will draw any reader in
closer touch with nature and the Almighty, my primal object in
each line I write. The human side of the book is as close a
character study as I am capable of making. I regard the character
of Mrs. Comstock as the best thought-out and the cleanest-cut
study of human nature I have so far been able to do." Perhaps the
best justification of the idea of this book came to her
when she received an application from the President for permission
to translate it into Arabic, as the first book to be used in an
effort to introduce our methods of nature study into the College
of Cairo.

At the same time that "A Girl of the Limberlost" was published
there appeared the book called "Birds of the Bible." This volume
took shape slowly. The author made a long search for each bird
mentioned in the Bible, how often, where, why; each quotation
concerning it in the whole book, every abstract reference, why
made, by whom, and what it meant. Then slowly dawned the sane and
true things said of birds in the Bible compared with the amazing
statements of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Pliny, and other writers
of about the same period in pagan nations. This led to a search
for the dawn of bird history and for the very first pictures
preserved of them.

In 1911 two more books for which Mrs. Porter had gathered
material for long periods came to a conclusion on the same date:
"Music of the Wild" and "The Harvester." The latter of these was
a nature novel; the other a frank nature book, filled with all
out-doors – a special study of the sounds one hears in fields and
forests, and photographic reproductions of the musicians and
their instruments.

The idea of "The Harvester" was suggested to the author by an
editor who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it,
about the ginseng diggers in her part of the country. Mr. Porter
had bought ginseng for years for a drug store he owned; there
were several people he knew still gathering it for market, and
growing it was becoming a good business all over the country.
Mrs. Porter learned from the United States Pharmacopæia and from
various other sources that the drug was used mostly by the
Chinese, and with a wholly mistaken idea of its properties. The
strongest thing any medical work will say for ginseng is that it
is "a very mild and soothing drug." It seems that the Chinese buy
and use it in enormous quantities, in the belief that it is a
remedy for almost every disease to which humanity is heir; that
it will prolong life, and that it is a wonderful stimulant.
Ancient medical works make this statement, laying special
emphasis upon its stimulating qualities. The drug does none of
these things. Instead of being a stimulant, it comes closer to a
sedative. This investigation set the author on the search for
other herbs that now are or might be grown as an occupation. Then
came the idea of a man who should grow these drugs
professionally, and of the sick girl healed by them. "I could
have gone to work and started a drug farm myself," said Mrs.
Porter, "with exactly the same profit and success as the
Harvester. I wrote primarily to state that to my personal
knowledge, clean, loving men still exist in this world, and that
no man is forced to endure the grind of city life if he wills
otherwise. Any one who likes, with even such simple means as
herbs he can dig from fence corners, may start a drug farm that
in a short time will yield him delightful work and independence.
I wrote the book as I thought it should be written, to prove my
points and establish my contentions. I think it did. Men the
globe around promptly wrote me that they always had observed the
moral code; others that the subject never in all their lives had
been presented to them from my point of view, but now that it had
been, they would change and do what they could to influence all
men to do the same."

After a short rest, the author began putting into shape a book
for which she had been compiling material since the beginning of
field work. From the first study she made of an exquisite big
night moth, Mrs. Porter used every opportunity to secure more and
representative studies of each family in her territory, and
eventually found the work so fascinating that she began hunting
cocoons and raising caterpillars in order to secure life
histories and make illustrations with fidelity to life. "It
seems," commented the author, "that scientists and lepidopterists
from the beginning have had no hesitation in describing and using
mounted moth and butterfly specimens for book text and
illustration, despite the fact that their colours fade rapidly,
that the wings are always in unnatural positions, and the bodies
shrivelled. I would quite as soon accept the mummy of any
particular member of the Rameses family as a fair representation
of the living man, as a mounted moth for a live one."

When she failed to secure the moth she wanted in a living and
perfect specimen for her studies, the author set out to raise
one, making photographic studies from the eggs through the entire
life process. There was one June during which she scarcely slept
for more than a few hours of daytime the entire month. She turned
her bedroom into a hatchery, where were stored the most precious
cocoons; and if she lay down at night it was with those she
thought would produce moths before morning on her pillow, where
she could not fail to hear them emerging. At the first sound she
would be up with notebook in hand, and by dawn, busy with
cameras. Then she would be forced to hurry to the darkroom and
develop her plates in order to be sure that she had a perfect
likeness, before releasing the specimen, for she did release all
she produced except one pair of each kind, never having sold a
moth, personally. Often where the markings were wonderful and
complicated, as soon as the wings were fully developed Mrs.
Porter copied the living specimen in water colours for her
illustrations, frequently making several copies in order to be
sure that she laid on the colour enough brighter than her subject
so that when it died it would be exactly the same shade.

"Never in all my life," she wrote, "have I had such
exquisite joy in work as I had in painting the illustrations for
this volume of 'Moths of the Limberlost.' Colour work had
advanced to such a stage that I knew from the beautiful
reproductions in Arthur Rackham's 'Rheingold and Valkyrie' and
several other books on the market, that time so spent would not
be lost. Mr. Doubleday had assured me personally that I might
count on exact reproduction, and such details of type and paper
as I chose to select. I used the easel made for me when a girl,
under the supervision of my father, and I threw my whole heart
into the work of copying each line and delicate shading on those
wonderful wings, 'all diamonded with panes of quaint device,
innumerable stains and splendid dyes,' as one poet describes
them. There were times, when in working a mist of colour over
another background, I cut a brush down to three hairs. Some of
these illustrations I sent back
six and seven times, to be worked
over before the illustration plates were exact duplicates of the
originals, and my heart ached for the engravers, who must have
had Job-like patience; but it did not ache enough to stop me
until I felt the reproduction exact. This book tells its own
story of long and patient waiting for a specimen, of watching, of
disappointments, and triumphs. I love it especially among my
book children because it represents my highest ideals in the
making of a nature book, and I can take any skeptic afield and
prove the truth of the natural history it contains."

In August of 1913 the author's novel "Laddie" was published in
New York, London, Sydney and Toronto simultaneously. This book
contains the same mixture of romance and nature interest as the
others, and was modelled on the same plan of introducing nature
objects peculiar to the location, and characters, many of whom
are from life, typical of the locality at a given period. The
first thing many critics said of it was that "no such people ever
existed, and no such life was ever lived." In reply to this the
author said: "Of a truth, the home I described in this book I
knew to the last grain of wood in the doors, and I painted it
with absolute accuracy; and many of the people I described I knew
more intimately than I ever have known any others. Taken as a
whole it represents a perfectly faithful picture of home life, in
a family who were reared and educated exactly as this book
indicates. There was such a man as Laddie, and he was as much
bigger and better than my description of him as a real thing is
always better than its presentment. The only difference, barring
the nature work, between my books and those of many other
writers, is that I prefer to describe and to perpetuate the best
I have known in life; whereas many authors seem to feel that
they have no hope of achieving a high literary standing unless
they delve in and reproduce the worst.

"To deny that wrong and pitiful things exist in life is folly,
but to believe that these things are made better by promiscuous
discussion at the hands of writers who fail to prove by their
books that their viewpoint is either right, clean, or helpful, is
close to insanity. If there is to be any error on either side in
a book, then God knows it is far better that it should be upon
the side of pure sentiment and high ideals than upon that of a
too loose discussion of subjects which often open to a large part
of the world their first knowledge of such forms of sin,
profligate expenditure, and waste of life's best opportunities.
There is one great beauty in idealized romance: reading it can
make no one worse than he is, while it may help thousands to a
cleaner life and higher inspiration than they ever before have
known."

Ending from: "Gene Stratton-Porter: A Little Story of Her Life and Work"
as it appeared in At the Foot of the Rainbow by Gene Stratton-Porter
New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1916, pp. 44-48.

Mrs. Porter has written ten books, and it is not out of place
here to express her attitude toward them. Each was written, she
says, from her heart's best impulses. They are as clean and
helpful as she knew how to make them, as beautiful and
interesting. She has never spared herself in the least degree,
mind or body, when it came to giving her best, and she has never
considered money in relation to what she was writing.

During the hard work and exposure of those early years, during
rainy days and many nights in the darkroom, she went straight
ahead with field work, sending around the globe for books and
delving to secure material for such books as "Birds of the
Bible," "Music of the Wild," and "Moths of the Limberlost." Every
day devoted to such work was "commercially" lost, as publishers
did not fail to tell her. But that was the work she could do, and
do with exceeding joy. She could do it better pictorially, on
account of her lifelong knowledge of living things afield, than
any other woman had as yet had the strength and nerve to do it.
It was work in which she gloried, and she persisted. "Had I been
working for money," comments the author, "not one of these nature
books ever would have been written, or an illustration made."

When the public had discovered her and given generous approval to
"A Girl of the Limberlost," when "The Harvester" had established
a new record, that would have been the time for the author to
prove her commercialism by dropping nature work, and plunging
headlong into books it would pay to write, and for which many
publishers were offering alluring sums. Mrs. Porter's answer was
the issuing of such books as "Music of the Wild" and "Moths of
the Limberlost." No argument is necessary. Mr. Edward Shuman,
formerly critic of the Chicago Record-Herald, was impressed by
this method of work and pointed it out in a review. It appealed
to Mr. Shuman, when "Moths of the Limberlost" came in for review,
following the tremendous success of "The Harvester," that had the
author been working for money, she could have written half a
dozen more "Harvesters" while putting seven years of field work,
on a scientific subject, into a personally illustrated work.

In an interesting passage dealing with her books, Mrs. Porter
writes: "I have done three times the work on my books of fiction
that I see other writers putting into a novel, in order to make
all natural history allusions accurate and to write them in such
fashion that they will meet with the commendation of high
schools, colleges, and universities using what I write as text
books, and for the homes that place them in their libraries. I am
perfectly willing to let time and the hearts of the people set my
work in its ultimate place. I have no delusions concerning it.

"To my way of thinking and working the greatest service a piece
of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal
of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it
shows him where he can be a gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier
man, it is a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one
beauty in nature he never saw for himself, and leads him one step
toward the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book, for one
step into the miracles of nature leads to that long walk, the
glories of which so strengthen even a boy who thinks he is dying,
that he faces his struggle like a gladiator."

During the past ten years thousands of people have sent the
author word that through her books they have been led afield and
to their first realization of the beauties of nature. Her mail
brings an average of ten such letters a day, mostly from
students, teachers, and professional people of our largest
cities. It can probably be said in all truth of her nature books
and nature novels, that in the past ten years they have sent more
people afield than all the scientific writings of the same
period. That is a big statement, but it is very likely pretty
close to the truth. Mrs. Porter has been asked by two London and
one Edinburgh publishers for the privilege of bringing out
complete sets of her nature books, but as yet she has not felt
ready to do this.

In bringing this sketch of Gene Stratton-Porter to a close it
will be interesting to quote the author's own words describing
the Limberlost Swamp, its gradual disappearance under the
encroachments of business, and her removal to a new field even
richer in natural beauties. She says: "In the beginning of the
end a great swamp region lay in northeastern Indiana. Its head
was in what is now Noble and DeKalb counties; its body in Allen
and Wells, and its feet in southern Adams and northern Jay. The
Limberlost lies at the foot and was, when I settled near it,
exactly as described in my books. The process of dismantling it
was told in 'Freckles, to start with, carried on in 'A Girl of
the Limberlost,' and finished in 'Moths of the Limberlost.' Now
it has so completely fallen prey to commercialism through the
devastation of lumbermen, oilmen, and farmers, that I have been
forced to move my working territory and build a new cabin about
seventy miles north, at the head of the swamp in Noble county,
where there are many lakes, miles of unbroken marsh, and a far
greater wealth of plant and animal life than existed during my
time in the southern part. At the north end every bird that
frequents the Central States is to be found. Here grow in
profusion many orchids, fringed gentians, cardinal flowers,
turtle heads, starry campions, purple gerardias, and grass of
Parnassus. In one season I have located here almost every flower
named in the botanies as native to these regions and several that
I can find in no book in my library.

"But this change of territory involves the purchase of fifteen
acres of forest and orchard land, on a lake shore in marsh
country. It means the building of a permanent, all-year-round
home, which will provide the comforts of life for my family and
furnish a workshop consisting of a library, a photographic
darkroom and negative closet, and a printing room for me. I could
live in such a home as I could provide on the income from my
nature work alone; but when my working grounds were cleared,
drained and ploughed up, literally wiped from the face of the
earth, I never could have moved to new country had it not been
for the earnings of the novels, which I now spend, and always
have spent, in great part upon my nature work. Based on this plan
of work and life I have written ten books, and 'please God I live
so long,' I shall write ten more. Possibly every one of them will
be located in northern Indiana. Each one will be filled with all
the field and woods legitimately falling to its location and
peopled with the best men and women I have known."

Ending from:
Gene Stratton-Porter:
A Little Story of The Life and Work and Ideals of "The Bird Woman" New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926.

After "Laddie" Mrs. Porter wrote eleven books,
alternating a book of pure nature study with the
novels, upon which her fame rests. "Moths of the
Limberlost" was published in 1912; "Michael
O'Halloran" in 1914; "Morning Face," titled after
the pet name of her little granddaughter, in 1916;
"A Daughter of the Land" in 1918; "Homing With
the Birds" in 1919; "Her Father's Daughter" in
1921; "The Fire Bird," an Indian epic which marked
her debut as a poet, in the same year; "The White
Flag" in 1923; "Jesus of the Emerald," another
poem, in 1924; "Tales You Won't Believe" in this
year also; and her posthumously published novel,
"The Keeper of the Bees," in 1925. During this
time her fame so increased that she became one of
the world's most widely read authors. Her publishers estimate that Mrs. Porter has more than
fifty million readers in America alone, not counting
the thousands who read her stories in translations.
At the time of her sudden and tragic death her publishers had sold more than 10,000,000 copies of her
stories. They estimated that for the past seventeen
years, seven days a week, her books have sold an
average of one thousand seven hundred copies a day.
If placed end on end her novels would form a continuous line, 1,100 miles long, as far as from Philadelphia to New Orleans, and if piled one on top of
another they would reach a height of 1,250,000 feet,
or 1,666 times the height of the Woolworth Building. These fantastic figures do not take into account the books in Spanish, Czecho-Slovakian, Danish-Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, German, and even
Arabic.

"Freckles" has been translated into Swedish,
French, Danish-Norwegian, German, and Spanish.
"The Girl of the Limberlost" may be read in Swedish and Czecho-Slovakian; "Michael O'Halloran," her
story of a courageous little newsboy who adopted a
baby, is printed in Dutch, Swedish, Danish-Norwegian, and Spanish. One can also read in Dutch,
"Laddie," "A Daughter of the Land," "The White
Flag," and "The Harvester"; in Swedish, "At the
Foot of the Rainbow," "The Harvester," "A Daughter of the Land," "Morning Face," and "The White
Flag," and in Danish-Norwegian, "Her Father's
Daughter." Some time before Mrs. Porter's death
she granted permission to translate "The Girl of
the Limberlost," "The Song of the Cardinal,"
"Freckles," and "The Harvester" into Arabic.

Especially in the nature-loving countries of Scandinavia have Mrs. Porter's stories won acceptance.
The breath of the outdoors, the knowledge and love
of the birds and flowers and wild things of the woods
appeal especially to the race that is famous for its
naturalists, explorers, and nature lovers. For in
spite of her remarkable popularity as a novelist,
Mrs. Porter has been always first a nature lover.
She has used her romances to bring to her readers
a whiff of the outdoors, a love of the woods and fields
and the flowers and birds, butterflies, and wild creatures that inhabit them. Between her novels she
took the time to write nature books about the birds,
the moths, and the flora of the Limberlost, the forests and swamps of her native Indiana, and after
moving to California she identified all but 93 of
the botanical specimens listed in California, and
discovered several which had never been listed. It
was with the hope of drawing people into the outdoors that she wrote "Freckles," "The Harvester," "The Girl of the Limberlost," and many
other of her famous nature stories. "The Keeper
of the Bees," her last book, is not about the Limberlost but is set in California, to which Mrs. Porter
moved a few years before her death, "to find her
place in the sun."

And one of the most remarkable phases of Mrs.
Porter's success is that throughout a long and varied
career she never failed to keep her faith with her
readers. Not long before her death she framed the
creed which had guided all her work – a creed which
she has lived up to just as rigidly in this new novel
of the discouraged and war-stricken youth who
found not only healing but an amazing romance on
the sunny coast of California.

"In the language of the old hymn, 'A charge to
keep I have' with my reading public," she said. "I
have taught 45,000,000 men and women and children to expect from me a story of men and women
who for the most part are living up to their highest
ideals, or are being punished because they are not.
I am neither blind nor lacking in perception as to
the waywardness and complications of human nature. It is merely that my call has been to reproduce the lives of clean, moral men and women, who
are spending their time and strength in an effort to
make the world a better place for themselves and for
their children.

"All natural history I ever have put into a book
has been the result of personal investigation, clean,
straight stuff, scientifically verified in every instance.
And all characters that I ever have incorporated in
a book I have tried sincerely to use in the working
out of recognized and high principles of conduct."

From "The Song of the Cardinal," the first story
that was the result of her burning indignation at
finding a little crimson firebird wounded in the road,
wantonly shot by hunters to test their aim, through
"Laddie," "A Girl of the Limberlost," "Michael
O'Halloran" to "The White Flag," her story of
Mahala and the search for a clean heart, Mrs. Porter has kept her faith. It was her pride that every
one of her books was clean, wholesome, breathing of
the simplicity and beauty of the woods and forests
which she loved so well.

One of the most beautiful tributes to Mrs. Porter
at the time of her death was the editorial in Outdoor
America, the official publication of the Izaak Walton
League, which we quote in part:

"Gene Stratton-Porter, friend of the outdoors,
whose pen was so often and generously used in defense of the wild places and the wild life of America,
has passed on.

"One of the founders of the Izaak Walton League
of America, always foremost in every fight waged
on the side of conservation of the outdoors she
loved, it is particularly fitting that Mrs. Porter's
last written words were a plea to save the elk of
Jackson Hole, just as the last written words of Emerson Hough, another great writer and great American, constituted a plea for us to carry on the work
of the League which he, too, had helped to start.

"When Mrs. Porter died the Izaak Walton League
lost one of its great friends. Perhaps the most fitting
tribute to Gene Stratton-Porter that we can make is
to carry on in the cause for which she worked and in
which she believed with every atom of her heart and
soul. If we can dedicate to her memory something
of the unspoiled forests of her dreams, we shall have
erected the monument she would have chosen; if we
can write her epitaph in terms of clean rivers, clean
outdoor playgrounds, and clean young hearts, we
shall have done what she would have asked."

Books by
GENE STRATTON-PORTER

NOVELS

THE SONG OF THE CARDINAL

1903

FRECKLES

Oct. 20, 1904

AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW

December, 1907

A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST

Aug. 17, 1909

THE HARVESTER

Aug. 17, 1911

LADDIE

Aug. 16, 1913

MICHAEL O'HALLORAN

Aug. 17, 1915

A DAUGHTER OF THE LAND

Aug. 17, 1918

HER FATHER'S DAUGHTER

Aug. 17, 1921

THE WHITE FLAG

Aug. 17, 1923

THE KEEPER OF THE BEES

Aug. 17, 1925

NATURE STUDIES

WHAT I HAVE DONE WITH BIRDS

May 10, 1907

MUSIC OF THE WILD

September, 1910

MOTHS OF THE LIMBERLOST

June 28, 1912

HOMING WITH THE BIRDS

Sept. 27, 1919

TALES YOU WON'T BELIEVE

April 10, 1925

FOR CHILDREN

MORNING FACE

Oct. 27, 1916

POEMS

THE FIRE BIRD

April 28, 1922

JESUS OF THE EMERALD

Dec. 21, 1923

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
Garden City, New York

About This Edition:

According to bibliographer David G. MacLean, author of Gene Stratton-Porter, A Book Collector's Guide, Decatur, Indiana: Americana Books, 1995, the biographical article Gene Stratton-Porter: A Little Story of The Life and Work and Ideals of "The Bird Woman" was first published in book form in 1915, by Doubleday, Page, Garden City, NY. I have been unable to find a copy of this printing.

Under the title, "Gene Stratton-Porter: A Little Story of Her Life and Work", what appears to be the same article was included as an introduction to Stratton-Porter's book At the Foot of the Rainbow, New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1916. There, it includes the following paragraph:
"Her publishers have felt the pressure of this growing interest
and it was at their request that she furnished the data for a
biographical sketch that was to be written of her. But when this
actually came to hand, the present compiler found that the author
had told a story so much more interesting than anything he could
write of her, that it became merely a question of how little need
be added." The identity of "the present compiler" was not indicated in this version.

In 1926, after Stratton-Porter's death, a revised version of the article was printed again in book form as Gene Stratton-Porter: A Little Story of The Life and Work and Ideals of "The Bird Woman" New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, c1915, c1926. (Copyright was not renewed.) The paragraph crediting Stratton-Porter herself with providing much of the material was dropped from the 1926 edition, and it was identified as "Compiled from many intimate records of the author's life by S. F. E." David MacLean considers the most likely candidate for "S.F.E." to be Eugene Francis Saxton (1884-1943), an editor at Doubleday Page.

Most of the differences between the two editions are minor revisions. Mentions of British publishers are omitted in 1926, and many tenses are changed from present to past. I have proofread from the 1926 edition, with one exception. The one major change was the rewriting of the final pages. Because I think the earlier ending contains interesting information about Stratton-Porter's intentions in writing, and about the fate of the Limberlost, I have chosen to include both versions of the ending in this on-line edition. The 1916 ending is inserted at the point where it appeared in the original article. It is set off in a box outline, using a different font color, to distinguish it from the 1926 edition, and is followed by the 1926 ending.
– Mary Mark Ockerbloom.